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Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (В.Л. Кибальчич) was born in exile in 1890 and died in exile in 1947. He is better known as Victor Serge, a Russian revolutionary and Francophone writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919, and later worked for the newly founded Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was openly critical of the Soviet regime, but remained loyal to the ideals of socialism until his death.

After time spent in France, Belgium, Russia and Spain, Serge was forced to live out the rest of his life in Mexico, with no country he could call home. Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, in Mexico city on 17 November 1947. Having no nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'